Tag: Business Cases

Focus: Users’ Stories & Use Cases

Preamble

Agile and phased development solutions are meant to solve different problems and therefore differ with artifacts and activities; that can be illustrated by requirements, understood as dialogs for the former, etched statements for the latter.

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Running Stories (Kara Walker)

Ignoring that distinction is to make stories stutter from hiccupped iterations, or phases sputter along ripped milestones.

Agile & Phased Tell Different Stories Differently

As illustrated by ill-famed waterfall, assuming that requirements can be fully set upfront often put projects at the hazards of premature commitments; conversely, giving free rein to expectations could put requirements on collision courses.

That apparent dilemma can generally be worked out by setting apart business outlines from users’ stories, the latter to be scripted and coded on the fly (agile), the former analysed and documented as a basis for further developments (phased). To that end project managers must avoid a double slip:

  • Mission creep: happens when users’ stories are mixed with business models.
  • Jump to conclusions: happens when enterprise business cases prevail over the specifics of users’ concerns.

Interestingly, the distinction between purposes (users concerns vs business functions) can be set along one between language semantics (natural vs modeling).

Semantics: Capture vs Analysis

Beyond methodological contexts (agile or phased), a clear distinction should be made between requirements capture (c) and modeling (m): contrary to the former which translates sequential specifications from natural to programming (p) languages without breaking syntactic and semantic continuity, the latter carries out a double translation for dimension (sequence vs layout) and language (natural vs modeling.)

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Semantic continuity (c>p) and discontinuity (c>m>p)

The continuity between natural and programming languages is at the root of the agile development model, enabling users’ stories to be iteratively captured and developed into code without intermediate translations.

That’s not the case with modeling languages, because abstractions introduce a discontinuity. As a corollary, requirements analysis is to require some intermediate models in order to document translations.

The importance of discontinuity can be neatly demonstrated by the use of specialization and generalization in models: the former taking into account new features to characterize occurrences (semantic continuity), the latter consolidating the meaning of features already defined (semantic discontinuity).

Confusion may arise when users’ stories are understood as a documented basis for further developments; and that confusion between outcomes (coding vs modeling) is often compounded by one between intents (users concerns vs business cases).

Concerns: Users’ Stories vs Business Cases

As noted above, users’ stories can be continuously developed into code because a semantic continuity can be built between natural and programming languages statements. That necessary condition is not a sufficient one because users’ stories have also to stand as complete and exclusive basis for applications.

Such a complete and exclusive mapping to application is de-facto guaranteed by continuous and incremental development, independently of the business value of stories. Not so with intermediate models which, given the semantic discontinuity, may create back-doors for broader concerns, e.g when some features are redefined through generalization. Hence the benefits of a clarity of purpose:

  • Users’ stories stand for specific requirements meant to be captured and coded by increments. Documentation should be limited to application maintenance and not confused with analysis models.
  • Use cases should be introduced when stories are to be consolidated or broader concerns factored out , e.g the consolidation of features or business cases.

Sorting out the specifics of users concerns while keeping them in line with business models is at the core of business analysts job description. Since that distinction is seldom directly given in requirements, it could be made easier if aligned on modeling options: stories and specialization for users concerns, models and generalization for business features.

From Stories to Cases

The generalization of digital environments entails structural and operational adjustments within enterprise architectures.

At enterprise level the integration of homogeneous digital flows and heterogeneous symbolic representations can be achieved through enterprise architectures and profiled ontologies. But that undertaking is contingent on the way requirements are first dealt with, namely how the specifics of users’ needs are intertwined with business designs.

As suggested above, modeling schemes could help to distinguish as well as consolidate users narratives and business outlooks, capturing the former with users’ stories and the latter with use cases models.

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Use cases describe the part played by systems taking into account all supported stories.

That would neatly align means (part played by supporting systems) with ends (users’ stories vs business cases):

  • Users’ stories describe specific objectives independently of the part played by supporting systems.
  • Use cases describe the part played by systems taking into account all supported stories.

It must be stressed that this correspondence is not a coincidence: the consolidation of users’ stories into broader business objectives becomes a necessity when supporting systems are taken into account, which is best done with use cases.

Aligning Stories with Cases

Stories and models are orthogonal descriptions, the former being sequenced, the latter laid out; it ensues that correspondences can only be carried out for individuals uniformly identified (#) at enterprise and systems level, specifically: roles (aka actors), events, business objects, and execution units.

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Crossing cases with stories: events, roles, business objects, and execution units must be uniformly and consistently identified (#) .

It must be noted that this principle is supposed to apply independently of the architectures or methodologies considered.

With continuity and consistency of identities achieved at architecture level, the semantic discontinuity between users’ stories and models (classes or use cases) can be managed providing a clear distinction is maintained between:

  • Modeling abstractions, introduced by requirements analysis and applied to artifacts identified at architecture level.
  • The semantics of attributes and operations, defined by users’ stories and directly mapped to classes or use cases features.
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From Capture to Analysis: Abstractions introduce a semantic discontinuity

Finally, stories and cases need to be anchored to epics and enterprise architecture.

Business Cases & Enterprise Stories

Likening epics to enterprise stories would neatly frame the panoply of solutions:

  • At process level users’ stories and use cases would be focused respectively on specific business concerns and supporting applications.
  • At architecture level business stories (aka epics) and business cases (aka plots) would deal respectively with business models and objectives,  and supporting systems capabilities.
Cases & Stories

That would provide a simple yet principled basis for enterprise architectures governance.

Further Reading

External Links

Focus: Business Cases for Use Cases

Preamble

As originally defined by Ivar Jacobson, uses cases (UCs) are focused on the interactions between users and systems. The question is how to associate UC requirements, by nature local, concrete, and changing, with broader business objectives set along different time-frames.

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Cases, Kites, and Clouds (Sigmar Polke)

Backing Use Cases

On the system side UCs can be neatly traced through the other UML diagrams for classes, activities, sequence, and states. The task is more challenging on the business side due to the diversity of concerns to be defined with other languages like Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN).

Use cases at the hub of UML diagrams
Use Cases contexts

Broadly speaking, tracing use cases to their business environments have been undertaken with two approaches:

  • Differentiated use cases, as epitomized by Alister Cockburn’s seminal book (Readings).
  • Business use cases, to be introduced beside standard (often renamed as “system”) use cases.

As it appears, whereas Cockburn stays with UCs as defined by Jacobson but refines them to deal specifically with generalization, scaling, and extension, the second approach introduces a somewhat ill-defined concept without setting apart the different concerns.

Differentiated Use Cases

Being neatly defined by purposes (aka goals), Cockburn’s levels provide a good starting point:

  • Users: sea level (blue).
  • Summary: sky, cloud and kite (white).
  • Functions: underwater, fish and clam (indigo).

As such they can be associated with specific concerns:

Cockburn’s differentiated use cases

  • Blue level UCs are concrete; that’s where interactions are identified with regard to actual agents, place, and time.
  • White level UCs are abstract and cannot be instanciated; cloud ones are shared across business processes, kite ones are specific.
  • Indigo level UCs are concrete but not necessarily the primary source of instanciation; fish ones may or may not be associated with business functions supported by systems (grey), e.g services , clam ones are supposed to be directly implemented by system operations.

As illustrated by the example below, use cases set at enterprise or business unit level can also be concrete:

Example with actors for users and legacy systems (bold arrows for primary interactions)

UC abstraction connectors can then be used to define higher business objectives.

Business “Use” Cases

Compared to Cockburn’s efficient (no new concept) and clear (qualitative distinctions) scheme, the business use case alternative adds to the complexity with a fuzzy new concept based on quantitative distinctions like abstraction levels (lower for use cases, higher for business use cases) or granularity (respectively fine- and coarse-grained).

At first sight, using scales instead of concepts may allow a seamless modeling with the same notations and tools; but arguing for unified modeling goes against the introduction of a new concept. More critically, that seamless approach seems to overlook the semantic gap between business and system modeling languages. Instead of three-lane blacktops set along differentiated use cases, the alignment of business and system concerns is meant to be achieved through a medley of stereotypes, templates, and profiles supporting the transformation of BPMN models into UML ones.

But as far as business use cases are concerned, transformation schemes would come with serious drawbacks because the objective would not be to generate use cases from their business parent but to dynamically maintain and align business and users concerns. That brings back the question of the purpose of business use cases:

  • Are BUCs targeting business logic ? that would be redundant because mapping business rules with applications can already be achieved through UML or BPMN diagrams.
  • Are BUCs targeting business objectives ? but without a conceptual definition of “high levels” BUCs are to remain nondescript practices. As for the “lower levels” of business objectives, users’ stories already offer a better defined and accepted solution.

If that makes the concept of BUC irrelevant as well as confusing, the underlying issue of anchoring UCs to broader business objectives still remains.

Conclusion: Business Case for Use Cases

With the purposes clearly identified, the debate about BUC appears as a diversion: the key issue is to set apart stable long-term business objectives from short-term opportunistic users’ stories or use cases. So, instead of blurring the semantics of interactions by adding a business qualifier to the concept of use case, “business cases” would be better documented with the standard UC constructs for abstraction. Taking Cockburn’s example:

Abstract use cases: no actor (19), no trigger (20), no execution (21)

Different levels of abstraction can be combined, e.g:

  • Business rules at enterprise level: “Handle Claim” (19) is focused on claims independently of actual use cases.
  • Interactions at process level: “Handle Claim” (21) is focused on interactions with Customer independently of claims’ details.

Broader enterprise and business considerations can then be documented depending on scope.

Further Reading

External Links

Focus: Business Processes & Abstraction

Preamble

Abstractions, and corollary inheritance, are primarily understood with objects. Yet, since business processes are meant to focus on activities, semantics may have to be refined when abstraction and inheritance are directly used for behaviors.

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How to apply abstraction to processes ?  (E. Gimenez Velilla)

Considering that the primary purpose of abstractions is to tackle business variants with regard to supporting systems, their representation with use cases provides a good starting point.

Business Variants: Use case’s <extend> & <include>

Taking use cases as a modeling nexus between business and systems realms, <extend> and <include> appear as the default candidates for the initial description of behaviors’ specialization and generalization.

  • <include>: to be compared to composition semantics, with the included behaviors performed  by instances identified (#) by the owner UC (a).
  • <extend>: to be compared to aggregation semantics, with the extending behaviors performed  by separate instances with reference to the owner ones (b).

Included UCs are meant to be triggered by owners (a); that cannot be clearly established for abstract use cases and generalization (c).
Included UCs are meant to be triggered by owners (a); that cannot be clearly established for abstract use cases and generalization (c).

Abstract use cases and generalization have also been mentioned by UML before being curiously overlooked in following versions. Since none has been explicitly discarded, some confusion remains about hypothetical semantics. Notionally, abstract UCs would represent behaviors never to be performed on their own (c). Compared to inclusion, used for variants of operations along execution paths, abstract use cases would describe the generic mechanisms to be applied to triggering events at UC inception independently of actual business operations carried out along execution paths.

Nonetheless, and more importantly, the mix-up surrounding the generalization of use cases points to a critical fault-line running under UML concepts: since both use cases and classes are defined as qualifiers, they are supposed to be similarly subject to generalization and specialization. That is misguided because use cases describe the business behaviors to be supported by systems, not to be confused with the software components that will do the job. The mapping between the former and the latter is to be set by design, and there is no reason to assume a full and direct correspondence between functional requirements and functional architecture.

Use Cases Distilled

As far as use cases are considered, mapping business behaviors to supporting systems functionalities can be carried out at two levels:

  • Objects: UCs being identified by triggering agents, events, and goals, they are to be matched with corresponding users interfaces and controllers, the former for the description of I/O flows, the latter for the continuity and integrity of interactions.
  • Methods: As it’s safe to assume that use cases are underpinned by shared business functions and system features, a significant part of their operations are to be realized by methods of shared business entities or services.

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Setting apart UIs and controllers, no direct mapping should be assumed between use cases and functional qualifiers.

The business variants distilled into objects’ or services’ methods can be generalized and specialized according to OOD principles; and the same principles can be applied to specific users’ interfaces. But since purely behavioral aspects of UCs can neither be distilled into objects’ methods, nor directly translated into controller objects, their abstraction semantics have to be reconsidered.

Inheritance Semantics: Structural vs Functional

As far as software artifacts are concerned, abstraction semantics are set by programming languages, and while they may differ, the object-oriented (OO) paradigm provides some good enough consolidation. Along that perspective, inheritance emerges as a critical issue due to its direct impact on the validity of programs.

Generally speaking, inheritance describes how structural or behavioral traits are passed from ancestors to descendants, either at individual or type level. OO design is more specific and puts the focus on the intrinsic features (attributes and operations) supported by types or classes, which ensues that behaviors are not considered as such but through the objects’ methods that realize them:

  • Structural inheritance deals with attributes and operations set for the whole life-cycle of instances. As a consequence corresponding inheritance is bound to identities (#) and multiple ascendants (i.e identities) are ruled out.
  • Functional inheritance deal with objects behaviors which may or may not be frozen to whole life-cycles. Features can therefore be inherited from multiple ascendants.

That structural vs functional distinction matches the one between composition and aggregation used to characterize the links between objects and parts which, as noted above, can also be applied to uses cases.

Use Cases & Abstraction

Assuming that the structural/functional distinction defined for objects can also be applied to behaviors, use cases provide a modeling path from variants in business processes to OOD of controllers:

  • Behaviors included by UCs (a) are to be set along the execution paths triggered by UC primary events (#). Inheritance is structural, from UCs base controllers to corresponding (local) ones, and covers features (e.g views on business objects) and associated states (e.g authorizations) defined by use case triggering circumstances.
  • Behaviors extending UCs (b) are triggered by secondary events generated along execution paths. Inheritance is functional, from extending UCs (e.g text messaging) to UCs primary controllers.

Yet this dual scheme may not be fully satisfactory as it suffers from two limitations:

  • It only considers the relationships between UCs, not with the characteristics of the use cases themselves.
  • It ignores the critical difference between the variants of business logic and the variants of triggering conditions.

Both flaws can be patched up if abstract use cases are specifically introduced to factor out triggering circumstances (c):

Use cases provide a principled modeling path from variants in business processes to the OOD of corresponding controllers.
Use cases provide a principled modeling path from variants in business processes to the OOD of corresponding controllers.

  • Undefined triggering circumstances is the only way to characterize abstraction independently of what happens along execution paths.
  • Abstract use cases can then be used to specify inception mechanisms to be inherited by concrete use cases.

That understanding of abstract use cases comes with clear benefits with regard to security and confidentiality.

What is at Stake

Abstraction can significantly reinforce the bridging role of use cases between business and UML models.

On one side specialized use cases can be associated to operations and functions directly implemented, e.g  by factoring out authentication and authorization:

One standard solution is to define a common use case controlling accesses for all users providing they can be identified before being subsequently (i.e during UC execution) qualified and authorized. Apparently, that could be done with <<include>> (a) or <<extend>> (b) connectors.

PtrnUC_abst

But the second option would not be possible with the semantic distinction suggested above for UC patterns, which specifies that use cases can only be extended from existing sessions.

A more generic approach (possibly with patterns) could try to “abstract” Open Session UC, e.g to cover a broader range of actors and identification mechanisms.

Understanding UC abstraction in terms of a partial specification to be <<included>> and run by the current thread will be inconsistent because there would be no concrete actor for the identification mechanisms (c).

By contrast, since inheritance connectors apply to types and not to instances (i.e execution threads), abstracted identification mechanisms are meant to be part of Manage Session and can be applied to triggering actors (d).

Such a clear distinction between the specification of threads (using connectors) and activities (using inheritance) should provide the basis of architecture-based UC patterns.

Al in all, that will greatly help to align business cases, business opportunities, and functional architectures.

Further Reading

 

Business Stories: Stakeholders’ Plots & Users’ Narratives

Preamble

As Aristotle noted some time ago, plots are the backbone of any story as they uphold the causal sequence of events and actions: they provide the “why” of what happens, compared to narratives, which tell “how” what happened is being told.

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Only shadows will tell: as far as stories are concerned, possibilities remain unknown until their realization.

So, in principle, plots deal with possibilities and narratives with realizations. But in fact plots remain unknown until being narrated; in other words fictions are like Schrödinger’s cat: there is no way to set possibilities and realizations apart.

That literary conundrum may convey some useful clues for business analysis, with stakeholders objectives seen as plots, and users’ stories as narratives.

Stakeholders’ Plots vs Users’ Narratives

With regard to the functionalities of supporting systems, a key issue for business analysts is to accommodate specific and/or short-term opportunities identified by business units with broader and long-standing objectives defined at corporate level.

Using the fictional metaphor, business expectations can be charted in terms of plots and narratives:

  • Business objectives (as plots) are meant to apply continuously and consistently to different agents, different concerns, and different contexts. As such they are best defined as rules and constraints (declarative schemes).
  • Users’ stories (as narratives) are supposed to translate as soon as possible into business transactions. As such they are best defined as sequences of operations governed by users’ choices (procedural schemes).

Then, just like narratives are meant to carry out the plots, users’ stories are supposed to follow the paths set by business objectives. But if confusion is to be avoided between strategic orientations, regulatory directives, and opportunist moves, the walk of business objectives and the talk of users’ stories should be termed differently.

Business Objectives (Plots): Symbolic & Allochronic

The definition of business objectives has to find its terms between the Charybdis of abstractions and the Scylla of specific business processes, the former to be avoided because they are by nature detached from reality and only make sense with regard to models, the latter because they would be too specific and restrictive. In-between, business objectives would be best defined through:

  • Strategic and financial objectives expressed using symbolic categories applied to environments, products, and resources.
  • Modal time-frames identified in reference to events and qualified by assumptions with regard to symbolic categories.
  • Business functions to be optimized given a set of constraints.

These could be comprehensively and consistently expressed with declarative languages.

Users’ Stories (Narratives): Actual & Contemporaneous

Users’ stories are at their best when tied to specific circumstances and purposes without being led away by modeling concerns. As narratives they should stick to agents, triggering events, and scripted sequences of options, operations, and outcomes:

  • Compared to the symbolic categories used for business objectives, users stories should refer to actual subsets of objects and events defined on contexts.
  • Contrary to the modal time-frames of business objectives, the scripts of users’ stories must be fully timed with regard to their triggering events.

That can only be expressed as procedures.

From Fiction to Artifacts: Aligning Business Objectives & Enterprise Architectures

Likening business analysis to its distant literary kin goes beyond the metaphor as it points to a practical organization of business objectives and users’ stories.

And the benefits of the distinction between declarative (for business plots) and procedural (for users’ narratives) blueprints is not limited to business analysis but can be extended to systems architecture (as plots) and software design (as narratives). On that basis declarative schemes could be applied to business functions and architectures capabilities, and procedural ones to users’ stories (or use cases) and software design.

XBredModels_PlotsNarrs

On a broader perspective that approach can be used to frame enterprise architectures and business objectives.

Further Reading

External Links